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SADIE
On the drive home, Ann wants me to tell her about my childhood. This isn’t all that surprising; she’s a therapist, and they always start there. I’ve always felt it’s sort of a waste of time. Life is in the now. The past is the past. Ann says I’m right. But she says self-awareness is important. History has a way of repeating itself.
She couldn’t be less wrong about that. We pass the gym, and she goes on talking about psychology and overcoming trauma. But I’m not listening. I’m too busy living it. The gym reminds me of the final straw before the final straw with Ethan. It came only days after that perfect day on the beach where my husband and I kept our eyes on the sky, where he tethered me to the earth.
“I’m starting yoga soon,” I say to Ann. It’s not the truth. But it could be. I want her to know I can hang. I want her to know that she is right to invest what she calls “emotional energy” on me.
“Yoga is amazing.”
I smile because Ethan thought that too. He’d gifted me the gym membership. Someone at his office was into yoga, and he though
t I ought to be too. It was just a suggestion, he said, when I was less than thrilled. But it was more than that. The gym was a simple gift that wasn’t a gift at all. It was a sign.
It was a sign that he wanted to take the little game we had been playing to the next level. And I was livid. He couldn’t understand why.
So I shifted my strategy. I figured two could play at his game. After all, why use words to get your point across when you can just as easily do it passive aggressively, disguised as a gift?
It’s not like I didn’t know he wanted me to lose the weight. He didn’t have to say it with words or with a gym membership. I knew he wanted me to stop being depressed, as though it were that simple. I knew he wanted me to find something that fulfilled me.
Just not a job, apparently.
Ethan said he wanted me to be happy. But what he really wanted was to have me around to meet his needs.
That’s what a wife is supposed to do, after all.
I’m still not exactly sure what a husband is supposed to do.
Suggest quick fixes, I suppose.
Part of strategy was giving him the silent treatment, his least favorite form of punishment. For days, he apologized profusely. He hadn’t meant for the gym membership to be such a big deal. He tried to make up with sex. As usual, finally, in the end, we played by his rules. As usual, it was over before it started.
It wasn’t until later, after we lay on the couch, my head on his chest, that I realized maybe he was right. Maybe there was no reason to be so unhappy. Maybe it was time to take things to the next level. After all, most women would kill for the kind of life I have. Ethan might have said that once or twice. I know my mother would have. And now, here I am with Ann, and she’s asking about her. Talk about coming full circle.
“If you want to understand the relationships in your life,” she says, “You have to start with your parents…”
“I hardly knew them. My mother worked three jobs.”
“And your father?”
“Hardly worked at all. But he wasn’t around much.”
“What did your mother do for a living?”
“She owned a cleaning business—very successful,” I say. It isn’t totally a lie. I leave a few things out.
During the week my mother cleaned houses. She washed other people’s dishes, handled other people’s dirty laundry. It was her own she didn’t handle so well.
“What about weekends? What did you do for fun, growing up?”
Fun wasn’t really in my vocabulary as a child. “I read.”
“Ah, so you were a bit like me.”
No, I was nothing like you. “The classics were my favorite. I suppose because they were easy to come by.”
“It must have been hard being raised by a single mom.”
You have no idea. “Not really. She was a hard worker. She did the best she could,” I tell her. She seems satisfied because none of it is lies. On weekends my mother worked at a dry cleaners. Whatever it took, she said, to keep a roof over our heads. But weeknights were different. Weeknights were all hers, so to speak. That’s when I was to make myself scarce. That’s when she entertained men. Serving others with household matters offered up a steady clientele at our doorstep. My mother worked herself to death, but I don’t think it was the work that killed her.
